Penn's Blog
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Legalising assisted suicide in the United Kingdom
I've been confined to a wheelchair since 1986 and in all that time I've never once thought that my life is not worth living. I cannot imagine what it must be like to want to end it all and cease living. A person must be suffering from the worst kind of depression to want to kill themselves. The business of whether euthanasia should be legalised in the UK has been ongoing for many years now and whether or not our government will ever allow the same practices to happen here in the UK like they do in Switzerland is something we will just have to wait and see. However there have been a few cases where people from the UK have travelled to Switzerland so they can end their life under the supervision of people who know what they are doing.
I don't practice religion at all, having said this I am certainly not an atheist and I do believe in God and I do think that if you are a good person then you will go to heaven, or whatever heaven may be. Now most religions look upon suicide as a serious, or even a grave sin. I also assume that these religions would tell you that you will not go to heaven if you take your own life. That does scare me a little bit, I know that when you're dead you're dead that's it, for all we know it could just be like turning out the lights, completely black, absolutely nothing. I would like to think that when I do die, I will go somewhere nice, after all I have been dealt quite a bad deal in this life. I don't consider myself to be a bad person so I would hope that God will take this into consideration. On the other hand, if I decided that my life was so bad and I just couldn't take it anymore and suicide was the only option, would that make me a bad person? Why should suicide be a grave sin? They do say that we all belong to God and only he can decide when we die, does that mean that he is allowed to watch people suffer debilitating illnesses, severe depression, lives that have no purpose for them anymore? Is he really the only person who can say enough is enough? If we sat back and watched a dog or cat suffer and didn't take immediate action then we would be in serious trouble, why should God be allowed to watch people suffer and not let them take their own life, or have others help them when they can't take any more?
Putting religion aside, if an adult with sound mind who is suffering from an illness or disability and cannot cope then they should have a right to decide if they are going to live or not. The biggest controversy is if they need somebody to help them, whether that be escorting them to a clinic, or actually holding a glass containing drugs for them to drink from. We all saw the recent storyline in Emmerdale where a tetraplegic character couldn't cope with life anymore and committed suicide with the assistance of his mother and boyfriend. He documented his thoughts for quite a long time and put it all on his computer. The storyline showed that he was completely sane and knew exactly what he wanted, he just couldn't carry out the final act by himself. If somebody who wants to take their own life can prove beyond doubt that that is their wish and they want their loved ones to help them then that should be allowed. Why should the law dictate that somebody with a completely sound mind cannot make up their own mind that they want somebody that they love dearly to help them. I suppose it all boils down to the fact that once a law like this is passed, people could under some circumstances take advantage of it.
Assisted suicide is not murder, it's not manslaughter, it's an act of love and I hope that one day the government will look upon it as just this and follows Switzerland's great example of how these clinics can really help people. -
Article in The Sun regarding Emmerdale tetraplegic assisted suicide plot
Ironside on Jun 09, 2011
Tagged in: Television , emmerdale tetraplegic assisted suicide , Disability , Assisted suicideI have posted this message on The Sun website because I feel that I was misquoted regarding the article that they wrote which included some of my comments and information from my website. Unfortunately I didn't realise that there is obviously a limit on how many words you can put on The Sun's comment section on their website. So this is the full article.
I feel that I must put a couple of points straight regarding the article that was published in the Sun today. The reporter obviously found me via my website because I had previously written a blog post about the tetraplegic character in Emmerdale. At the time I had no idea where this plot was going, nor how much controversy it was going to cause. I want to put straight that I did not state that Emmerdale was "losing the plot". It's quite the opposite actually, I think they carried it off really well and I doubt whether any of the other big soaps could have done quite such a good job and made the plot look credible. I saw nothing horrific about the scenes where we saw him ingest a lethal concoction of drugs contained in a drink. I could understand if he threw himself under a train, or got somebody to slit his wrists, but I just don't see what all the fuss about the scenes we saw the other evening.
A lot of people are up in arms and would rather see a positive storyline regarding disability, rather than all doom and gloom. The script writers have been extremely brave in going down the road of assisted suicide, maybe there wouldn't have been such an outcry if it was somebody suffering from Motor Neurone Disease, I think the fact it was a young 20-year-old who could have possibly lived for another 40 years. That said, this is not fiction, this has happened in recent years so I see no harm in addressing this very sensitive subject. The soaps have covered just about every other subject, rape, child molestation, murder, domestic violence, why not assisted suicide? Somebody on here quoted that this is just a television drama, I totally agree, this is a drama at the end of the day, the script writers have got a duty to write scripts that will keep people interested and not flip the switch and go and watch something else. There is only so much you can write about somebody in a wheelchair who cannot move anything apart from his bed. We saw Jackson carry out a parachute jump, that was great, but do we want to see him do it over and over again? I suppose they could have turned him into some kind of super crip where we saw him scuba-diving, skiing, mountain climbing, but that isn't going to keep the public's interest. My hats go off to the Emmerdale script writers for approaching the subject of assisted suicide and carrying it out with such sensitivity and credibility.
I think that Marc Silcock portrayed somebody with a spinal cord injury extremely well and to the untrained eye, could probably pass himself off as a genuine disabled person. I'm afraid the same thing can't be said about other storylines which saw people suffering brain injuries after being shot. These people have now made a miraculous recovery after both being unable to walk or talk properly, less than a year later they're trotting around as if nothing has ever happened. These are the type of storylines that we should be slating as they could give false hope to people in the same situation. It was obvious that Jackson Walsh was never going to recover and saw no other way out of the situation than ending his life prematurely. Way to go Emmerdale
